Tag Archives: Nuclear Radiation

Final Prompt

An Exciting Summer for Nuclear Futures and Environmental Humanities – (Contains some spoilers)

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Since the end of our spring semester class, there have been two media blockbusters (the television miniseries Chernobyl and the film Godzilla: King of Monsters) that have made an immense impact on premium cable and the box office respectively. Chernobyl is an HBO historical drama miniseries that serves as a graphic and in-depth recounting of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the sequel to the 2014 Godzilla movie, but more than that it is a rather significant reboot of the new multimedia franchise and fictional universe, called the “MonsterVerse ” which also includes King Kong and his new movies.
Chernobyl is a five episode miniseries on HBO, a premium cable network, and was introduced right after the world-famous Game of Thrones series came to an end. The show itself is an excellent retelling of the specific events that happened in the early morning of April 26, 1986. The beginning of the show is the accident itself from the perspective of workers inside the nuclear power plant before, during, and after the explosion. It offers immense and accurate scientific background and information about how a nuclear power plant operates as well as what exactly went wrong inside the reactor to cause the disaster. Fortunately viewers will not get lost in a sea of nuclear physics jargon, because the scientific numbers and data get put in terms that everyone can understand for the sake of one of the main characters who is not a physicist but is a top bureaucratic official for Mikhail Gorbechev. In addition to the in-depth look we get at the nuclear power plant, we also get an equally fascinating view inside the Kremlin, the secret meeting spot for the top officials of the Soviet Union. It is here we get the full display of subterfuge, conspiracy theories, and the questionable decision making of the Soviet Union due to paranoia, pride and obsession.
One of the most significant aspects of the show is the in-depth perspectives of the main characters: an accomplished physicist with a terrible secret and a life-long bureaucrat questioning his lifetime of work. This gives us a chance to see inside two incredibly important communist institutions: the Kremlin, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. However, arguably the best part of the show is the graphic detail put forth to show the damage and dangers of nuclear radiation. The special effects showing the catastrophic power of the exposed core are phenomenal. One moving example is when the first of the firefighters on the scene accidentally touches a smoldering piece of exploded core material and within minutes viewers see that the radiation has eaten through his gloves and has already severely burned his hand. Radiation sickness is gruesomely brought to a new and hideous light in the show, as horrible disfiguring boils, lesions, tumors and scars eventually make the characters unrecognizable and virtually inhuman in appearance. The Chernobyl miniseries gives new material vibrancy to nuclear radiation, a topic which many people may not be familiar with, and gives the general public a horribly vivid example of slow violence. The damage slowly caused by nuclear radiation sickness that torments the human body and horrifically changes down to the cellular level.
There is one rather significant drawback to the show: all of the actors are British and nearly the entire script of the show is in English. This takes away from the full immersion of being in the Soviet Union during the Chernobyl accident and gives the sense of a British reenactment rather than an authentic Eastern European account. There are some parts of Russian dialogue and announcements and more often than not they were not translated, leaving us foreign in a supposedly genuine Soviet retelling. This does not make the show unwatchable, but it is definitely something viewers will notice .
Godzilla has represented the seen and unseen damage of nuclear radiation and technology for more than 50 years. He has gone from rampaging monster to protector guardian several times and has had his appearance changed as well. He has often reflected the general understanding and consensus of nuclear power of the time. However the impact of nuclear radiation on the environment has been a very strong premise in the Godzilla movie franchise. Godzilla: King of the Monsters changes that and makes it one of the major plot points in the movie.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters starts right after the disaster in San Francisco that Godzilla caused in 2014. Since that attack, many of the “titans” or gigantic radioactive monsters have been discovered and researched by a quasi-governmental agency called “Monarch.” As the movie quickly progresses, other titans are awoken by various means: some wake up on their own and some are awoken by an Eco-terrorism group that believes the titans will bring environmental balance back to the earth, a balance they believe humans have disrupted. In support of this claim, there is scientific and physical evidence of nature flourishing and thriving wherever the titans roam or rest. The movie also mentions how the nuclear radiation given off by the titans accelerates natural growth and actually heals the planet. The plot picks up when the Eco-terrorists awaken “Monster Zero,” or “King Ghidorah”: a three-headed, two-tailed, lightning-emitting, flying monster. King Ghidorah eventually awakens the remaining titans and causes them to go on a destructive rampage wherever they reside. However, Godzilla ends up defeating him, and the other titans submit to Godzilla and become peaceful once again. This resolution provides evidence for the first time in this movie series that Godzilla may actually be here to help the earth and humans.
Overall, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a CGI-masterpiece thrill ride, but the acting and plot leave a lot to be desired. The struggle between Monarch and the actual government seems tedious and unnecessary, while the overall goals of the Eco-terrorism group is a bit one-dimensional. However, it brings a lot of new ideas and premises to the Godzilla “MonsterVerse.” There is a subtle yet powerful message of nuclear futurity and environmental humanities that cannot be ignored. Although the titans give off massive amounts of nuclear radiation and destroy entire cities, the simple solution of destroying the monsters is not a viable option as it only causes more destruction. The titans have become part of the planet and we have to learn to deal with the problems we create. The idea that we must learn from our past mistakes and work with them in order to fix them (like in the course text Staying with the Trouble) is a fundamentally important principle of Environmental Humanities. Hopefully this subtle yet powerful message is a recurring theme and message in the evolving “MonsterVerse” movie franchise.

Additionally, Dark just released its second season on Netflix today. So hopefully we will have more things to discuss about nuclear futurity.

Final Prompt

Slow Violence and the Importance of Interdisciplinary Research and Communication

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Rob Nixon and his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor provided me with a world of new information and insightful connections that really shaped my thinking about the world, specifically the importance of discussion and interaction between diverse fields of study in Environmental Humanities. As a person who enjoys studying both science and the humanities, I think having a diversity of knowledge is always important and this reading reinforced my idea of the importance of interdisciplinary study, research, and communication. In preface of the book he sites and connects the ideas of three prominent figures from different fields of academia.

First he discusses Edward Said, a professor of literature, who discusses world literature and politics, political idealism and the distribution of information. Distribution of information is how knowledge is divulged and disseminated by the rich and privileged, such as the government and monopolies, to the public. In the modern neoliberal era, hoarding knowledge and information is equivalent to hoarding natural resources and money. In addition, not sharing information could lead to information being entirely geographically-based and therefore not available to the entire world. This may lead to large scale misinformation and isolation, where “alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternate information, [are] keenly aware of environmental human rights and libertarian impulse that binds us together in this tiny planet” (Nixon X).

Nixon next considers Rachel Carson, a science writer who discusses the military industrial complex, socio-environmentalism, and environmentalism of the poor. Nixon explains that she emphasizes the problems of compartmentalizing expertise and information, bloated corporate funding and the privileged feigning objectivity and interest in humanitarian efforts.

Finally Nixon examines Ramachandra Guha a sociologist. He explains how Guha focuses on how environmentalism is connected to global distribution of justice, militarization and unequal rates of consumption. Guha also strongly rejects the ideas of sentimentalizing “traditional” cultures and ecology, as he thinks ecology is a rather stagnant field of study because it does not properly consider sociopolitical factors.

In the introduction to his book, Rob Nixon discusses a multitude of different ideas and examples to really describe the idea of slow violence. The first example that really reached me was the dumping of chemical, nuclear, and other hazardous waste to Africa by first-world countries to appease their own environmentalism. This idea was advocated by Lawrence Summers, the president of the World Bank who thought it would “help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity” (Nixon 1). The idea that you can balance “toxicity” in the world by sending it somewhere else, rather than reducing output or making less toxic, is obviously absurd and self-serving. In addition to decimating these lands for natural resources, both in the past and present, we are now sending them toxic materials that we have no real idea how to manage. This will lead to a world wrought with irreversible environmental, social, political and economic calamity.

Nixon describes slow violence as “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time” and also as “neither spectacular or instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” by giving examples like climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, acidifying oceans, and the aftermath of war. The average person, sadly myself before this class, considers these topics every now and then, when the media deems it devastatingly interesting enough. We always learn that they have been occurring for a constantly and for a long time and now it is too late to actually help. When I heard these environmental tragedies listed one after another and how they are all examples of slow violence, it dawned on me how they are all connected in a horrible ways. Nixon explains how the media and public only respond to sensational and visceral events and they ignore the ones that you cannot see or feel. This made me immediately think of distribution of information because if the rich and privileged control the media and information they control what the public understands and how they feel. This creates a public that merely respond to tragedy as inevitable because they are fed regulated information, which Edward Said deems aptly as “the normalized quiet of unseen power” (Nixon 6). This really made me think about how social media and the internet almost seem to promote this concept by the mindless “retweeting” and “liking” of other people’s ideas. This creates a culture of using and promoting media-approved information, rather than researching your own information and sharing your own ideas. Although promoting and disseminating information is an invaluable part of academia and the media, it must be done with diligence and integrity and be available to all people. Otherwise environmental problems, along with a slew of other problems, will never be properly considered and solved.

Although it has nothing to do with the environment or nuclear futures, the concept of slow violence has always made me think of the issue of concussions and CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) in sports. I enjoy sports and frequently watch the ESPN channel on television. A topic that always arises every football season is CTE and how it affects so many former athletes. Recent research shows that multiple and consecutive concussions slowly damage the brain beyond repair and that it can start early as little league tackle football. The result has been an increase in funding for research and a lot of former athletes donating their brain to science. Tragically Dave Duerson, a former professional football player, ended up shooting himself in the chest so his brain could be donated and researched for CTE and other brain injuries. The result of this information has also led to a decreased participation in little league tackle football and many former and current professional football players saying they would not allow their kids to participate in tackle football at a young age. This damage is slowly accumulating, the results of the tackles aren’t as gruesome as broken limbs, and can only be seen until the damage is beyond repair. This is a version of slow violence would rarely be considered because CTE of athletes is outside the scope of conventional academia. Consequently those who know of the CTE problem would not have much of an opportunity to hear about a term like slow violence because it is a term used mostly in environmental-related areas of study. This damage is eerily similar to nuclear radiation, it is slow, invisible and irreversible. The only way to ease this damage is to prevent it from happening. Like the nuclear industry, football and other sports have monopolized regulations that favor monetary gain over proper safety. The public has begun to see the problems in both of these industries and many are advocating overhauling changes to both. Only time will tell if this will lead to safer regulations and practices in either sports or the nuclear industry.

 

Related articles:

Decreased Participation in Youth Football

http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warner-youth-football-participation-drops-nfl-concussion-crisis-seen-causal-factor

CTE Found in Nearly All of the Brains Donated by NFL Players

https://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/539198429/study-cte-found-in-nearly-all-donated-nfl-player-brains

Prompt 8

The Challenges of Writing Nuclear Futures

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“Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Conference” was an amazing opportunity to see the topics of nuclear time, nuclear risk, and especially writing about nuclear futures from a variety of professors from the fields of both Japanese and Germanic studies. A topic that I noticed was a theme in many of the presentations was the difficulty of writing about nuclear futures. The obvious choice when writing about anything to do with nuclear technology is to choose a desolate post-apocalyptic world with no government or social order. Although it can send an effective message about the dangers of nuclear technology, it rarely offers any way of preventing the disaster, dealing with disaster as it happens or recovering from the disaster. Usually the only solace in these stories is either overthrowing a tyrannical ruler or finding a hidden oasis of natural resources, neither of these solutions are realistic nor even a long-term solution. So creating a myth narrative that does not solely rely on a doomsday or apocalypse scenario proves to be both important and difficult. The importance of dealing with the problems of a nuclear disaster, both during and afterwards, is the myth narrative the scholars in the field of nuclear futures wants to emphasize. Donna J. Haraway calls it “Staying with the Trouble” and the “Chthulucene,” i.e. not relying on the future to fix our problems and instead focusing on the here and now.

Professor Suzuko Mousel Knott offered some incredible insight on the idea of writing nuclear futures as a myth narrative, about which she suggests “myth is a narrative of the past and also explains the present and tries to illuminate the future.” She suggests another problem for the doomsday narrative for nuclear futures is that the idea of an apocalypse is mostly a western and Christian-toned construct. Japanese myth and religion do not really have a doomsday or an apocalyptic event that ends the world: it has a more cycle of life and death, which is a more eastern ideal. She highlights the “untranslatability of catastrophe” as a challenge of writing about nuclear futures. Slow violence, changing time-scales and temporalities are very difficult concepts to explain or visualize in writing. She explains changing time-scales and temporalities of myth through the novel The Emissary by Yoko Tawada. Time-scales are challenged from the start by the two main characters, Yoshiro and Mumei. Yoshiro is over 100 years old and still rather naive and active, and Mumei the sickly child is wise-beyond-his-years. The temporalities of myth come into play as well, both di-temporality and synchronicity, when Mumei views the world map for the first time and passes out. He awakes around 10 years in the future, where he is in a wheelchair and his grandfather is still alive. He goes on to have a wonderful date with the girl he met outside his house wearing the strange suit, who has also aged around 10 years. He is allowed to experience a “normal life” for this short period of time, only to again pass out and awakens as a child again only to die shortly after. His last thought being “I’m all right. I had a really nice dream,” a rather fitting end for this child stuck between shifting temporalities. Dr. Knott stated it best that disasters “ruin known time-scales and temporalities,” as well as “make cyclical time seems impossible,” and “make untold futures seem more likely.” We have to face these problems and many others when trying to write about nuclear futures and environmental humanities.

Image result for the emissary yoko tawada

(https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-emissary/)

Professor Bradley Boovy also offered fascinating concepts on the transcorporeality and transtemporality of nuclear radiation. He describe the boundaries between living organisms and the surrounding ecosystem as a “thin and permeable membrane,” through which radiation can easily pass. Relating this idea to human life may be difficult or confusing, so many authors use animals to describe the thin and permeable membrane between living organisms and their ecosystems. Professor Boovy uses the famous three-eyed fish Blinky from The Simpsons, who is mutated by waste from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. He suggests the fish depicts how the water systems and fish are more susceptible to radiation and contamination, that the membrane between sea life and their ecosystem is an incredibly thin and invisible membrane. By using animals as an analogy or even as a whimsical lens helps us understand how the borders between our lives and ecosystem are thin, even if we try to ignore it with science and technology. While at the same time providing some relief with some of the difficulties of writing about nuclear futures. Professor Boovy also cites the book Bad Environmentalism and suggests that nuclear futures writers “reject the doomsday aesthetic.” He further suggests that nuclear disasters and radiation “transcend space and time,” and that there is “no ‘outside’ the contamination zone or death zone,” which are concepts that challenge conventional temporality and time-scales. These final suggestions, along with the difficulties of nuclear future writing, stood out to me as one of the most significant challenges facing the environmental humanities as a field of study.

Image result for blinky fish simpsons

(http://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-blinky-the-simpsons-three-eyed-fish-headed-for-san-francisco/)

Prompt 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).

Prompt 2

Time scales from the human perspective

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Question 3.  How does environmental devastation, and nuclear disaster in particular, challenge received human time scales?

 

Time scale is an arrangement of events used to measure the relative or absolute duration of a period of time. There are several different time scales that are used to describe different events and phenomena. We use geological time scale to describe the history of the earth, often in millions or billions of years. However, historic or human time scale is the one to describe the events of humans; it is usually described in days, months, years, decades, and/or centuries. This is very short compared to other time scales, seeming almost insignificant. To humans a year is a long time and a decade is even longer; humans can barely fathom what an entire century entails, without looking to their parents or grandparents.

Technology has changed or received notion of time scales, with innovations of transportation, construction, and distribution of information, travel and construction is done at a much faster rate. Thus environmental disasters that could disrupt the channels of transportation, construction and information could alter our current notions of human time scale. This is the precariousness of modernity and futurity. Assuming technology will always be there to make our lives easier creates precariousness that we do not even consider. Environmental disasters are always going to exist and affect the lives of humans and this creates a pervasive sense of precariousness. These effects compound and our modernist reliance on technology results in an even more precarious life.

The dangers of environmental devastation of ordinary fossil fuels are starting to be understood rather than ignored. Greenhouse gases, melting of the polar ice caps, acidification of the oceans are all things that are finally being discussed on a transnational scale. Their effects on the world challenge our notion of time because of how slowly they change the earth, over decades and centuries. Since humans cannot see this happen in their daily lives it is often dismissed as a problem for others, so scholars came up with the term “slow violence” to describe things that affect our lives but are not seen or felt in our everyday lives. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as, “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time.”

Nuclear technology is a source of energy for many developed nations in the world. It is powerful, efficient and uses less natural resources than the technology of fossil fuels. It often seems like the source of energy of modernity, futurity, and neoliberalism. Unfortunately this technology has dangers that are not as obvious as smog, greenhouse gases, and the bleaching of coral reefs. The dangers of nuclear technology come from the radioactive materials used in the creating of the energy and the waste that is left over afterwards. One form of the technology is used for making bombs of devastating destruction. Besides the obvious devastation of the bomb itself, there is another dangerous form of violence that is left long after the bomb has detonated. Rob Nixon describes this “slow violence” by talking about the Marshall Islands after 67 nuclear bomb “tests” between 1948 and 1958: “In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’, a condition that compromise independence in the long term.” This is a perfect example of how nuclear disasters, such as constant nuclear bomb “tests” can challenge our notions of human time scales. By simply testing our technology in a foreign country, we set back another nation’s entire independence for decades.

Cesium-137, the result of the fission between uranium and plutonium, has a half-life of about 30 years and is very common in nuclear technology. It has been released into the air from the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Cesium-137 also spreads quickly in nature because of its high water solubility. Before nuclear technology Cesium-137 was not present on earth in significant quantities for around 1.7 billion years, again challenging our notion of human time scale. We know from Little Voices From Fukushima of how it would take over 40 years to clean Japan of Cesium-137. In Precarious Japan Anne Allison describes how the events of 3/11 in Fukushima reintroduced the stigma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terms like genpatsu nanmin (nuclear-refugee) and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). Showing how nuclear devastations can span decades, generations, and even centuries further challenges our notion of human time scale.

The convenience of technology and the precariousness it creates, especially from nuclear technology, fundamentally challenges our notion of a human time scale. While technology enhances development of moving, building, and learning more efficiently over the course of decades and centuries, environmental devastation can take all of that away in a few minutes or hours and leave us with repercussions that last years, decades or even longer.

 

Jordan Foster